We're about to enter a new period for fuel cell manufacturer Ballard Power Systems (NASDAQ: BLDP) , both for good and bad. The good thing is that the comapny expects to break even on an EBITDA basis this year for the first time ever. The bad news is that one of its largest clients, Plug Power (NASDAQ: PLUG) , will start to manufacture its own fuel cells. With so much news surrounding this industry lately, it can be difficult to get a feel for how to value these companies over the long term. So let's do a little sales growth forecasting to determine what we can expect from Ballard over the next several years to come.

Who are we talking about here?For the past several years, Plug Power and Ballard have been tied at the hip. All of Plug Power's fuel cell systems built to replace traditional batteries in equipment such as forklifts have used Ballard's fuel cell stacks as part of an exclusive supplier agreement. This symbiotic relationship will not be as great as it was before, though, because Plug Power just purchased fuel cell stack manufacturer ReliOn for $4 million in stock. At the end of 2014, Plug and Ballard's exclusivity agreement will come to an end, and it's likely that Plug will start to use RleiOn's fuel cell stacks in its fuel cell systems.

Source: Ballard Power Systems investor presentation.

But Ballard's business goes beyond just its deal with Plug Power -- it is diversifying into several other possible uses for fuel cells as well. The company has already made some modest inroads with the Telecom industry as a power supplier for emergency backup power for cellular towers. In 2013, the company's product sales in this part of the business grew by 74% to over $20 million annually. Also, Ballard signed a four-year service contract with Volkswagen in 2013 estimated at $55 million-$90 million. Both Ballard and Volkswagen are looking to develop fuel cell technology into vehicles. With Toyota looking to ship its first fuel cell vehicles to the Los Angeles market in 2015, the possibility of using hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles are looking more possible by the day, even though there are still several hurdles it will face along the way.

What kind of value is in this company's stock?Ballard has been around for a while, but up until recently fuel cells were so costly to manufacture it hardly seemed worth it to purchase one despite the competitive advantages they provided. Ballard has yet to generate a profit from the sale of its fuel cells, and it even registers losses on EBITDA to this day because of expensive manufacturing costs. The company does anticipate that it will break even on an EBITDA basis for the year through both an increase in sales as well as improving gross margins across all of its product lines.

Still, without much to work with regarding profitability, one crude way we can get an idea of what to expect from this company in the future is to look at its price-to-trailing-12-month-sales ratio, which today stands at 7.7. After its 150% gain the past few months, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that this is a very strong premium to the S&P average price to sales of 1.7. Aside from Plug Power, though, Ballard's shares are valued at a pretty high premium in comparison to many of its high-flying energy technology peers.

Ballard is a growth-oriented company, so it probably should carry some premium to the S&P average, but to be valued at more than four times the overall market based on this metric, it would need to post some pretty impressive sales numbers. According to S&P Capital IQ, we should expect to see healthy growth and just about double current sales by 2016.

Source: Capital IQ, author's calculations Note: Revenue from its former contract manufacturing business prior to 2011 was omitted from this chart to better reflect the growth it can from sales and service of its fuel cells.

Ballard has not yet achieved the type of sales growth that S&P is estimating over the next couple of years and analysts estimate that fuel cell sales are only expected to grow by 18.9% annually. Also, Plug Power's ReliOn deal will likely mean that sales to Plug will decline over time. However, this does not mean that Ballard will no longer be selling fuel cell stacks to Plug Power. If Plug Power can meet its lofty sales growth goals, then it will most likely need to purchase stacks from Ballard at a pretty high rate. Also, if Ballard can continue to grow sales in its emergency backup power units at the same rate it did over the past year, it isn't completely out of the realm of possibility to see Ballard grow sales well above the industry average.

Company growth versus investor expectationsNo matter how much potential Ballard has, it's highly unlikely that shares will trade at such a lofty price-to-sales premium for long. For that metric to fall in line with its peers, either the company will need to grow sales at an incredible pace or the price of those shares could decline to bring it back to a more modest valuation.

For investors, we don't want to buy shares in a company simply for the price to stay the same while sales catch up to a high valuation. We want the price of those shares to appreciate. So let's draw out some potential scenarios for the company. The following tables give a breakdown of what kind of sales growth Ballard needs to achieve over the next several years to bring its price-to-sales ratio in line with its peers as well as the S&P average. It also give the sales it will need to achieve over those same time periods to achieve compounded annual returns of 8%,10%, 12%, and 15% on shares at those price-to-sales ratios.

These calculations are not to show you exactly what will happen with shares over the next several years, but rather they lay out various scenarios to help show what it will take to get to a certain point in the future. As long as Ballard continues to grow sales at an impressive rate, we can assume that it will be priced at a premium to the S&P average, but probably not as high as it is today. Based on that assumption, it will be extremely difficult for the company's shares to grow much more over the next couple years. Further down the road, though, the chances of meeting pretty high rates of return become that much greater. If the company could maintain a sales growth at a compounded annual rate of 22.2% for the next 10 years -- ambitious but certainly attainable -- then the company's price-to-sales ratio could fall to a much more modest 2.6 times and you could still expect an annualized return of 15%, which would put shares of Ballard at $16 from current prices.

What a Fool believesBallard may lose its exclusivity contract with Plug Power, but that doesn't mean the end of this company. Investors should probably be ready for shares to take a big hit over the next year or so as fear of Plug Power going off on its own and the price-to-sales ratio falling more in line with its peers in the space. Over the long term, though, there is room to grow even at today's prices, but lots of things need to go right to make it happen. You know, those little things like actually make a profit.

If you do buy shares in Ballard, though, be sure that you are investing over a long-term time horizon -- more than five years -- and you have the temperament to weather a major sell-off or two over the next couple years.

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This article has a lot of data but fails to mention the most important points about BLDP and its relationship with PLUG. Please keep in mind that Plug Power (PLUG) accounts for only about 10% of Ballard Power's (BLDP) revenue. As BLDP continues to obtain more contracts this year, PLUG will become even less significant in BLDP's outcome. BLDP produces fuel cell stacks for PLUG forklifts. BLDP recently increases the sale of their fuel cell technology to the automobile industry, the main reason for their dramatic increase in revenue in the last couple of years. Meanwhile, PLUG is stuck with forklifts and cannot produce its own fuel cell technology. Since PLUG is becoming very unstable, BLDP wants to eliminate all of its contracts with PLUG as soon as possible. In the next several years, unless PLUG makes significant changes to its business practices, BLDP will remove all of its remaining contracts with PLUG. BLDP is gaining long-term foothold in the automobile industry, which is drastically much more stable and profitable than PLUG gaining short-term foothold in the forklifts and other short-term contracts.

PLUG is playing games and is dangerous to its own survival. Plug Power had serious technical problems with fuel cells operating at all conditions, cold, hot, humid, etc., Balalrd has learned from all those problems and can custom make fuel cell on a mass scale. Instead of latching on to a Giant partner like Ballard, Plug has chosen to buy a wimpy company on the verge of bankruptcy. Now Plug has the Giant burden to convince that the new fuelcells,(will be different than the Ballard ones due to IP rights) will be as good or better to Walmart. P&G, FedEx, etc... That will be a monumental task.

GE partnered (50/50) with Snecma of France to conquer the World with its CFM56 series of gas turbine Engines , and it did.

PLUG had the opportunity to do the same with Ballard (50/50) but blew it. Typical US arrogance for a company, and it may be the downfall, IMHO... Time will tell. Ballard can move on.. But Plug is one trick pony... . Ballard has auto, Trains( Yes Warren Buffet's Burlington is testing Ballards fuel cells), Aircraft ( Boeing and Airbus are testing fuel cells), trucks and military stealth programs for quiet operation its appliction arsenal. Patient investors in Ballard will rewarded handsomely.

Hello, something I can't figure out about this Plug purchase and how it affects Ballard is this - they bought it for 4 million dollars. That's the price of 2 or 3 convenience stores. Something doesn't add up.

But moving forward these contracts with the companies will help them increase their

Revenues and will expose them to a larger market. Since the kind of business they have is something new, a couple of new contracts will put them in the right direction and will help them gain more market share.

I was just thinking if Plug Power does alliance with any company that has a complimentary business; this strategy will help them achieve cost efficiencies and synergies. They will be able to achieve more in a lesser period of time and will help them reach a position where they can start giving returns to their shareholders. http://goo.gl/FZPPBc

I was just thinking if Plug Power does alliance with any company that has a complimentary business; this strategy will help them achieve cost efficiencies and synergies. They will be able to achieve more in a lesser period of time and will help them

Having Price-To-Sales Ratio (TTM), also called the P/S Ratio, of 26.22 at the time of my posting, it is too expensive to buy PLUG shares. Combining the ridiculously expensiveness of PLUG shares shown by the above ratio of 26.22 and their risky business practices, buying PLUG shares today and in the next few weeks is like accidentally overdosing oneself with heroin. I apologize to those who enjoy daily heroin. But I am quite sure you enjoy heroin only when the dose is just right, not when suddenly you realized you overdosed it. I digressed. My main point is that buying PLUG shares now is blatantly dangerous.

Here are the P/S Ratio of a few related companies, just to have more things to compare with that of PLUG. The P/S Ratio of:

Tesla (TSLA) is 12.70 (Thus, their shares are considered much cheaper to buy than PLUG shares are. Only strong companies deserve to have this P/S Ratio, and TSLA is one of those strong companies.)

Google (GOOGL) is 6.07 (Google is a strong company, yet their shares are even cheaper to buy in terms of P/S Ratio.)

Ballard Power (BLDP) is 7.08 (BLDP invests in strong, LONG-TERM contracts with major industries such as AUTOMOBILE, TRAINS, AIRCRAFTS AND FEDERAL STEALTH PROGRAMS. Yet, their P/S Ratio is reasonable at 7.08, not too expensive at all for a strong company like BLDP.)

Plug Power (PLUG) is .................................... need not say more.

This article by Tyler Crowe seems to be a PAID PROMOTION of PLUG. In the process, his obvious attempt to mislead the readers and degrade BLDP serves the purpose of promoting PLUG in the fall out of the relationship between PLUG and BLDP. Notice how he said, "Ballard's shares are valued at a pretty high premium...." when evaluating Ballard's P/S Ratios. Yet, Ballard's P/S Ratio is shown as 7.7 on his chart while PLUG's P/S Ratio is 27.7!!!!!!! He mentioned only four words on PLUG: "Aside from Plug Power," to which a lot of readers can totally missed on their reading. If Ballard Power's shares are valued at a pretty high premium (with P/S Ratio of 7.7), then what should we say about Plug Power's shares (with P/S Ratio of 27.7)!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Twenty-seven point seven!!!!! Twenty seven and seven tenths in P/S Ratio!!!!!PLUG = 27.7!!!!! P/S Ratio of PLUG is 27.7!!!!!!!

As many doors will open for Ballard as will close when the exclusivity with Plug expires. Any other player in the North American material handling market will be able to engage Ballard's services if it wants. Ballard already supplies material handling OEMs in Europe with fuel cell stacks.

When Ballard's contract and non-compete with the Daimler/Ford JV expired in 2013, people thought Ballard was out of auto. Ballard signed the VW deal within a month. And Ballard STILL maintains a productive, profitable relationship now directly with Daimler (not though the AFCC anymore). Expect the exact same dynamic with Plug.

Even though Plug represents 10% of Ballard's 2013 revenue, Ballard's margins on its Plug business were only 15%. Ballard's Plug revenue is its lowest margin business.